The Lioness Origin Story Podcast

Welcome to Lioness: the Origin Story, a twelve-part podcast series that traces the origins of the Army’s Team Lioness program and how it served as a steppingstone for the creation of Female Engagement Teams and Cultural Support Teams.
Each week co-hosts Daria Sommers and Army Lioness Veteran Shannon Morgan, along with Shaun Hall, talk to Army and Marine women who served in these special capacities in Iraq and Afghanistan, giving them a platform to share their personal stories and narrate this hidden history. Many of the women who volunteered for these roles returned to their units without proper credit and, for those who experienced combat, without access to the healthcare they needed.
Begun in Iraq in 2003, Team Lioness was a below-the-radar, boots-on-the ground program that attached women soldiers to direct combat units in an effort to ease interactions with Iraqi women and children. The Lioness soldiers’ effectiveness in defusing tensions led the way for the creation of Female Engagement Teams and Cultural Support Teams, all of which contributed to DoD’s rescinding the Combat Exclusion Policy for Women in 2013.
Initially one of the goals of the podcast was to provide an historical counter to Taylor Sheridan’s fictional Spc Ops: Lioness. After a few episodes it became evident that the real life stories of the women who served were infinitely more riveting than the TV show which quickly became irrelevant.

Army Captain and Lioness Anastasia Breslow. Ramadia, Iraq. 2004.

Photo of Lioness Veteran Shannon Morgan at home in Arkansas. 2007
Hosts Daria Sommers and Shannon Morgan were both involved, in different ways, with the Lioness story. In 2008 writer and filmmaker Daria Sommers, along with her colleague, Meg McLagan, released Lioness, a feature documentary that revealed the history of the group of women support soldiers who went to Iraq in 2003 as mechanics, clerks and engineers but ended up serving in direct ground combat as part of the original group of Team Lioness soldiers.
One of those soldiers was Shannon Morgan. An Army mechanic from Mena, Arkansas, Shannon served in Ramadi from 2003-2004. During the 2004 Battle for Ramadi, she was one of the Army Lioness soldiers attached to the 2/4 Marines during house to house searches. That put her at the center of some of the fiercest street fighting of the war. But because of the Combat Exclusion Policy, when she returned home she had to fight to get her service recognized and receive the benefits she was entitled to as a combat veteran.